I'm Quitting Social Media
(temporarily) & J.Cole Has The Sight. A two-fer on creativity & doing what's best for you.
I’m quitting social media – for the month of July, at least, and maybe for the rest of what I ideologically consider summer, so through Labor Day weekend. I’ll still be publishing these essays weekly – and hopefully more frequently – and my podcast will still come out on Tuesdays, but I will be completely off TikTok and Instagram, a prospect that thrills me as much as it frightens me. I haven’t taken such an extended break from social media since I started making capital-C Content in early 2021, and whenever I’ve considered it I’ve scared myself away from the idea. But enough is enough, I think. There are other endeavors I want to give my focus to, and beyond that, I have reached a point where to preserve any semblance of creative excitement, I simply must unplug from The Feeds.
By now we are all well aware of the insatiable algorithm monsters curating our feeds, rewarding the hottest and richest among us primarily for being hot and rich (and usually not Black.) The prevailing wisdom is that if we do not present these beasts with consistent offerings then we will miss the random day when they choose to benevolently smile down at us and grant us a viral video (and the resultant fame and riches, of course.) If it sounds like I’m being overdramatic…of course I am, that’s part of my whole thing lmao. But it also speaks to a larger sense of exhaustion I think a lot of people like me feel, those of us who are accidental content creators of a kind: creative people who have a craft to share and are tasked with learning how to best game the most effective communication channels of our time to share it.
I’ll never deny that social media has been an incredible democratizing force in creative fields. I’m one of probably millions of people who’ve had my life changed by these platforms, and I don’t think there’s ever been so many avenues to creative success – whether you define that as reach, financial freedom, or some mixture of both – without the interference of industry gatekeepers as there are right now. But, at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something kind of gruesome about watching dozens, hundreds, thousands of hours of human creativity be chopped and screwed into mush with the perfect two-second hook and set to just the right unexpected/funny/inspiring audio so that the guy flipping switches at TikTok HQ the algorithm will shine its gracious light upon us. When I found myself spending more time thinking about which editing techniques would best promote this newsletter on social media than what I actually wanted to write about, I knew things had gone seriously awry. It’s time for me to touch grass, as the youths would say.
I fear our culture of overconsumption and the “contentification” of daily life has infected the creative process. We are now supposed to create work to capitalize on every microtrend that captures the TL’s attention for even a second, to chime in on every pop culture happening with a bite-sized, shareable hot take, the same way Shein updates its website daily with thousands of plastic items to fit whatever niche aesthetic a handful of extremely online teenagers have deemed cool. But when we try to match this mechanical pace of output, the outcome is the same: poor quality products that are not even close to worth the human costs. Quality will inevitably degrade: there is a reason that even the staunchest capitalists among us know that when scaling a business, a measure of quality is typically the first thing you sacrifice. To reach that speed, something else will simply have to go. In our productivity-focused, my 5-9-before-my-9-5, always-be-optimizing culture, the results of nurtured creativity, ideas that have been given the time and space to be adequately explored and executed to their highest potential, are what we have chosen to put on the chopping block.
There’s a scene in Mad Men, one of my favorite shows about white men behaving badly, where a new manager from London chastises the show’s chief villain protagonist, Don Draper, for letting his team of creatives alternately run amok and loaf about, playing darts and napping and smoking weed and what-have-you. Don responds with a line that’s galvanized many a creative director after missing a work deadline: “You came here because we do this better than you, and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are.” In essence, doing your best creative work means giving yourself the freedom to be “unproductive,” something you just can’t do when the goal is simply to put out as much as possible as quickly as possible. Doing your best means giving your brain time to work through ideas and information and images until they come together in a new way, or at least an interesting one – something that’s become less and less common as we become more fixated on being cool than creative. I’ll be spending some of my time unplugged letting this happening in the background of my mind and maybe exploring some of the features on Substack, but mostly I’ll be focused on enjoying my socialite summer, being barefoot in the grass, and letting my deep-fried and crispy dopamine receptors return to factory settings. Can’t wait!
J.Cole Has The Sight
If you managed to miss the Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar beef, then congratulations: you are insulated from the happenings of these internet streets in a way I can only dream of. Before Kendrick and Drake traded a silly number of diss tracks, Kendrick was declared victor, and all of West Coast hip-hop c-walked on the grave of Drake’s career on Juneteenth, J.Cole entered the fray – and just as quickly removed himself from it. He pulled his diss “7 Minute Drill” from streaming services and publicly apologized to Lamar on stage at his label’s Dreamville Festival, calling the track a “misstep.” “The past two days have felt terrible,” he said, referring to when he released the track two days prior to the performance. “It let me know how good I’ve been sleeping for the past 10 years.”1 (As an aside, I love knowing that J.Cole and I are alike in this way: making professional decisions based on how they impact our sleep hygiene.)
When talking to a friend about all the drama, I said that Cole “received a download from the future” about where the beef was going and wanted no part of the carnage to come. I was kidding, but the more I think about it, I believe there might be some truth to that, actually – and that there’s a powerful lesson involved in all this. In the immediate aftermath of pulling the song, Cole was clowned endlessly on the internet and in countless group chats, I’m sure. But in a matter of weeks it was clear that he had made the right decision in a way that none of us could have predicted. I’m not going to spend too much time waxing poetically on this – this situation has taken up far more than its fifteen minutes in the zeitgeist – but there’s something to be said in doing what feels right for you, even if the court of public opinion doesn’t get it, is judging you for it, is mocking you for it. You know what’s best for you, and if you ever doubt that, just think of J.Cole sleeping peacefully while Drake furiously scribbled a verse for A.I. Tupac and thought it was a genuinely good idea.
That’s it from me this week! Last week, paid readers read about gratitude and a dispatch from my socialite summer, which I’m blogging with pics in a way that feels very retro and fun for me. I was raised by all the girlboss media gals in early 2000s romcoms, so in a way I’m living the dream.
Here’s an excerpt:
I was thinking about how I might close out the week when I found out a London-based friend of mine was in town, so we linked up at the Center for Fiction in Downtown Brooklyn for a reading from Tyriek White’s new book, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer. Afterward we headed over to Peaches Brooklyn with other writers/editors/assorted book people for drinks and apps. Sangria was consumed to match the dress and there was a rousing conversation on why Geminis are problematic and the virtues of experimenting with psychedelics, so I’d say socialite summer is off to a smashing start!
Last week on the pod, I answered listener questions about going out solo, dealing with negative friends, and ending negative self-talk. Listen here.
Lola xx